The 32-bit Advanced RISC Machine (ARM) chips are used widely in cell phones and tablets. They have also begun to appear in microservers such as HP’s Moonshot, based on a partnership with Calxeda, Inc. since November.

At the server level, low-power chips are suited to environments where many relatively lightweight operations such as Web serving must be performed in parallel at massive scale.

Meanwhile, other low-power chips such as Intel Corp.’s Atom have been sold for similar purposes, including microserver startup SeaMicro Inc.’s products prior to the company’s acquisition by AMD. SeaMicro’s products were also resold by Dell.

“That’s a great question,” Dell executive director of marketing Steve Cumings said when asked why an IT pro seeking low-power scale-out hardware would use ARM over Atom or vice versa.

The answer is what Dell is after with the limited shipments of Copper, as well as two test clusters being set up in Dell’s Texas headquarters and at the Texas Advanced Computing Center for remote access by interested parties.

Currently, there’s a lot of code written for consumer devices on ARM, but very little in the way of enterprise applications, which is one thing holding ARM back. Dell also announced it will offer a version of its Crowbar automated server provisioning software on ARM by the end of the year.

The fact that 64-bit ARM designs have yet to hit production is a limiting factor to server-level adoption of the chip. Dell expects ARM servers to be used in production over the next 18 months to two years, when 64-bit chips become commonplace.

The Dell Copper server offers 48 ARM microservers based on the Marvell Armada CPU in a 3U shared environment. Each server node consumes 15 watts and includes Serial Advanced Technology Attachment or Flash storage; up to 8 GB RAM; and a 1 GbE input. Four server nodes are packed into a sled, each of which contains a non-blocking Layer 2 switch, and each chassis contains 12 sleds. The entire chassis draws 750 watts of power.

As part of Dell’s sustainable packaging strategy, Dell will start shipping some of its equipment in mushroom cushioning, wrote Oliver Campbell, Dell procurement director on the Direct2Dell blog.

Developed by the the National Science Foundation, the US EPA, and the USDA, mushroom cushioning is a unique packaging technology, Dell explained.

With it, “waste product like cotton hulls are placed in a mold which is then inoculated with mushroom spawn. Our cushions take 5 – 10 days to grow as the spawn, which become the root structure – or by the scientific name, mycelium – of the mushroom. All the energy needed to form the cushion is supplied by the carbohydrates and sugars in the ag waste. There’s no need for energy based on carbon or nuclear fuels.”

The new mushroom-based packaging is but Dell’s latest advance in earth-friendly packaging. The company already uses bamboo packaging, in which it ships select laptops and tablets. But mushroom-based packaging is better suited to heavier products like servers and desktops, the company said.

What will be the first product to ship swaddled in fungus? The PowerEdge R710 server. The company claimed it has tested the packaging extensively to ensure that it can ensure safe shipments, “and it passed like a champ.”